This Reckless Beauty
Rhiannon Hooson
Charles Bennett
June 2004 40 pp
ISBN 0 9536989 5 5
£5
Some more information...
A member of the Wild Women group 2002 - 2004,
This Reckless Beauty is Rhiannon’s
first published collection of poetry.
Extract
Ibid
1.
In those neat compilations of stars,
mist, moonlight, nights would file
into their own categories: here arced
with the glimpsed comet’s path; here
the warmth of childhood sleep. And there
is where I read; stroking the nubbed cotton
with the goose-foot skin of my elbow
as I turned the page. A child with only
books beneath her bed sleeps well.
I read into the darkness – words the torch
was bright enough to hide, words
my mouth slipped wetly over in the dim,
numbed dark that rises, quiet, before sleep.
The air of that room was strained like tea
through the crack of amber light
beneath the door. I held my breath,
skipped forward to the index; the appendices,
where sadness made sense of itself,
where the string of words promised
to continue under other covers,
and where, silent, a pale kernel of longing
formed, and grew, and made me lust
for dawn.
2.
The first, perhaps, came with the siren scream
of the newborn plunging toward the waves.
Or did I see the pale, damp skin of Persephone
pressed against the dirt, mouth gulping for sun?
More probable is the man with taut neck
and iron sword – heroes, after all, are easier
to spot in the crowd of tragic women (hair
trailing in the water, jealous virtues hanging
askew).
In the mirror, I traced the profile of my nose,
stern-browed, wishing for troops
to muster. It went like this:
Beaten gold breastplates flash
the sky’s hot semaphore from the rocks.
The plumed chargers rear, skitter
loose stones across the plain, and from my scalp
already blood and ash drip
dark onto the studded leather.
I shake the sun from my eyes
and open my throat, call death
into the mean-muscled hearts
of men whose names the autumn rains
will wash from the yellow soil.
3.
Who did I become? Each night dying
under a different sun made me forget
what subtle fears had moulded me.
My name shrieked itself into a rough battle cry.
My hands became dull fists of meat.
Those circling birds have long since
learnt to wait, leagues ahead, anticipating
the wind’s shrill carnage, sudden
as a flashbulb.
Who did I become?
All of them.
Each in their footnoted wholeness,
with each long lust for glory a rust-streak
across my skin, and I with only
a pen, a page, an itch
and only a notebook
to hide it in.
(Rhiannon Hooson, pp. 10/11)
'Glistens in the dark like a pointed end of a spear...sensual and dangerous, revelling in the primal forces simultaneously held and released by each poem.'